Omega’s Flush (Prime Match #6)

Prologue Theo

Eight years earlier

I take a number and find a plastic chair near the back wall where I can watch both exits.

It’s an old habit, knowing where the doors are. Not that a fight is likely to break out in the waiting room at the Omega Bonding Bureau but old habits are hard to break.

The woman next to me is filling out her paperwork with a pen that keeps dying. She scratches at the form, licks the nib, tries again. Her hands are shaking.

She looks like she hasn't slept in days and I recognize the expression on her face because I see it in every reflective surface I pass. She’s also not sure that the money she is going to get is worth the price she has to pay.

For me, the math is straightforward. The Bureau registration payment is two hundred and twenty dollars.

That’s more money than I’ve had in my pocket for a long time.

It’ll last weeks if I'm careful, which I always am. It’ll buy me time to figure out the next thing.

That is all I have ever done: figure out the next thing and the next thing and the next until eventually, theoretically, I arrive somewhere that isn't this.

My last meal was a sandwich from the reduced shelf at the corner store on Fifth yesterday, plastic-wrapped turkey on white bread with a sell-by date that was optimistic even when it was printed.

Before that, a handful of peanuts from a bowl at a bar where I sat nursing a glass of water for two hours, pretending to watch a game I had no interest in.

This is the part nobody tells you about living on the streets and keeping to yourself.

It's not the danger or the cold or the lack of a fixed address. It's the smallness of it. It’s the way your world contracts until everything is about the next meal. Where is it coming from? How long until you need another one? What are you willing to do to get it?

What I am willing to do, apparently, is register with the Omega Bonding Bureau.

I know it's a bad idea. I've known it since I picked up the leaflet at the shelter three days ago, the one with the aggressively cheerful slogan: Your match is waiting!

The smaller print underneath explained the registration incentive program. I give them a blood sample and my scent profile and they carry out biological compatibility screening. In exchange, I get a one-time payment to cover "transport or other miscellaneous expenses during the matching process."

Two hundred and twenty dollars.

By the time my number gets called, I've been sitting in the chair for two hours. The registration clerk is a beta woman in her forties with reading glasses on a chain.

"Confirm your name and birthday please.”

"Theo Holland. Fourteenth of March."

She types without looking up. "Age?"

"Eighteen."

"Designation?"

"Omega."

She looks up and gives a quick scan of my clothes, my weight, my general state of not-quite-holding-it-together. Her expression doesn't change but something in her eyes does. Pity. I hate pity. I'd rather she looked at me with contempt.

"Any previous registrations?"

"No."

"You haven’t filled in family history. We need to know if there is any history of heart disease, diabetes, that kind of thing.”

"I don’t know any of that."

I stare at the form. Family history. My mother was an omega bonded to an alpha who drank and hit and controlled every aspect of her existence until the day he hit her a bit too hard when I was nine and she didn’t wake up from her hospital bed.

My father put his fist through a stranger's jaw in a bar when I was twelve and caught a bottle across his throat for the trouble.

I had foster homes after that, three of them in four years, until I aged out of the system and discovered that the state's interest in your welfare expires at roughly the same time your usefulness as a line item on someone's budget does.

As far as I know, neither of them had any form of heart disease.

She types this in. "And you're registering voluntarily?"

"Yes."

She glances at the computer screen and begins reading off of a script. "You understand that registration enters you into the Bureau's matching database? That if a compatible match is identified, you may be contacted and subject to the Bureau's matching protocols?"

"I understand."

She slides a consent form across the counter.

I scan it. The language is dense but the meaning is clear: by registering, I'm giving the Bureau permission to analyze my biological profile and match me with a compatible alpha.

If a match is identified, I'll be subject to whatever protocols the Bureau deems appropriate.

I sign it.

The blood is drawn in a room down the corridor, past a poster with an overly cheerful young omega/alpha couple on it. The two of them are grinning as if they’re on drugs. I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

Instead, I take a seat in the lab and roll up my sleeves when ordered.

"Small pinch," the phlebotomist says as he slides the needle in.

I watch my blood fill the vial. It’s dark red and ordinary. There’s nothing in there that should be worth two hundred and twenty dollars to anyone, except the Bureau.

He fills three vials, labels them, puts them in a rack. "The scent profile requires a separate sample. I'll need you to hold this against your wrist for thirty seconds."

He hands me a cotton pad wrapped in plastic. I press it to my pulse point and hold it there, feeling slightly ridiculous.

I count to thirty then pass the pad over.

The technician seals the cotton pad in a bag, labels it, then types something into his laptop. "All done. You can collect your payment at the front desk."

At the front desk, the clerk counts out two hundred and twenty dollars in twenties, has me sign a receipt, and wishes me a nice day.

I put the money in my inside jacket pocket, the one with the zip, and walk out of the Bureau office into a Tuesday afternoon that looks exactly like every other Tuesday afternoon of my life except that I now have enough money to eat.

And I also now have a potential match hanging over my head. The thought fills me with horror.

The rational part of my brain is already calculating. The Bureau's matching database is enormous. It has millions of profiles. The probability of a high-compatibility match is statistically low.

Most matches are in the sixty-to-seventy percent range, which carries no legal obligations. You'd need to hit ninety percent or above for the Bureau to try force it and matches that high are rare enough that I don’t need to worry about.

It’s not going to happen, I tell myself. It’s free money. That’s all.

I tell myself this as I walk to the nearest store and buy bread, peanut butter, bananas, and a bottle of water. The total comes to eight dollars and forty cents.

I find a spot for the night under the overhang behind the laundromat on Kellerman Avenue, where the industrial dryers vent warm air through a grate. I've slept here before. It's not comfortable but it's warm and dry and nobody bothers you.

I make myself two peanut butter sandwiches and it’s the best meal I've had in a week.

I try not to think about my mother, but there's something about lying in the dark with nothing to do that makes it impossible to keep that particular door closed.

She comes to me in fragments: the smell of her perfume, the way she'd hum in the kitchen when he wasn't home, this low tuneless sound that was the closest thing to happiness I ever saw in her.

Then there was the way she'd go quiet the moment his key turned in the lock. The way her body would change, her shoulders pulling inward, chin dropping, everything about her shrinking to take up less space.

I was seven when I understood what was happening. Not the specifics. I didn't have language for the dynamics of bonded pairs, but I understood the shape of it. The way she couldn't leave.

Her alpha, my father — although I don’t like to think of him like that —drank more after she died.

The fights got worse. The bar on the corner of our street became his permanent residence, and I learned to stay away until very late, until I could hear through the front door whether it was safe to go in.

Sometimes it wasn't, and I'd sleep on the landing outside our apartment, curled up against the wall, listening to him breaking things inside.

The point is: I know what a bond does and I will never let that happen to me. No matter how hungry I get. No matter how cold the sidewalk is.

This is what I tell myself as I fall asleep.

The notification arrives the next morning.

I'm at the public library, using the free Wi-Fi to check my email. There's one new message. The subject line reads: Prime Match Notification.

The bottom drops out of my world. I open it and the world gets very small.

Dear Mr. Holland,

Following your registration and biological screening, the Omega Match Bureau is pleased to inform you we have identified a Prime Match with a compatibility rating of 97.4%.

I read the number and reread the number and the number doesn't change. Ninety-seven-point four percent. Prime. It’s not the sixty-something percent background noise I'd calculated as the unlikely worst case.

Not even the ninety percent threshold that would put me on the Bureau's radar.

Ninety-seven point four, which is so far above the statistical average that my first coherent thought is that there's been a data error.

It has to be. The chances are too small for it to be real.

My second thought is less coherent. It's just noise. White noise, filling my head, drowning out the hum of the library's air conditioning and the tap of keyboards and the rustle of someone turning pages at the table beside me.

I scroll down.

Your matched Alpha is: Dominic Novikov.

I don't recognize the name. I close the email.

I sit very still in the library chair and breathe and wait for my hands to stop shaking.

The math is simple and the math is everything. The Bureau knows my name. They know my blood type, my scent profile, my designation. They have my registration address — the shelter on Vine Street. They will follow up. They will escalate.

I have, at most, a few days before the system starts looking for me.

I walk out of the library into a morning that's too bright and stand on the sidewalk and do the only calculation that matters.

I have two hundred and twelve dollars left. That’s enough for a bus ticket and enough to survive on the other end until I figure out the next thing.

I have a backpack with two changes of clothes, my toothbrush, the food I bought yesterday and a paperback novel I took from a free library box two days ago and haven't finished.

I walk to the bus station and do more calculations. I’ll need some money when I get to my destination but making that destination as far away as I can is more important.

The clerk doesn’t blink an eye as I ask him how far my money will get me. Fifteen minutes later, I’m sitting at the back of an old Greyhound, watching the city disappear behind me.